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: 


The Farmer 
and 


The Single Tax 


| By James R. Brown 


We mean by the single tax, one tax, 
and that levied upon the value of land 
exclusive of all improvements, in lieu 
of all other taxes. How would this 
affect the farmer? The opponents of 
the single tax go to the farmer and tell 
him that the single tax is a tax on land, 
and that he should oppose it. This is 
absolutely untrue. The purpose of the 
opponents is to get the farmer to resist 
any change in our present dishonest 
#, and stupid tax system, which enables 
' the opponents of the single tax to put 
' into their private pockets large amounts 





of public value. 


The single tax is the lightest tax the 
farmer can pay, because the average 
farmer has very little land value. Very 
little of the farm values of this state 


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are land values; they are labor values. 
An ordinary farm worth $10,000 in 
this state has not more than $500 of 
land value. Deduct the labor values 
represented by the house, barn, out- 
buildings, fences, drains, orchards, crops 
and conditions of culture, not more 
than $500 would remain that could 
be said to be real land value. 


If we were to assess 5 per cent. on 
the land values of this state the sum 
total raised from all the agricultural 
lands would not exceed $20,000,000, 
while the land values of New York 
City lots alone, at that rate, would 
raise over $250,000,000. 


No wonder the land speculators want 
to continue a system of taxation that 
presents them with so much land value 
in the great cities and loads down with 
taxes the labor values of the rural 
districts, 


There is no doubt of the farmer be- 
ing overtaxed. The entire value of 
all the farms in the state, exclusive of 
the results of labor thereon, does not 
amount to $400,000,000, while in New 
York City the assessed value of the 
ordinary lots, excluding docks and the 
valuable land franchises, amounts to 
$5 000,000,000. ; 


WHAT TAXATION REALLY IS 

Now, taxation is payment for social 
service. A citizen should pay for what 
he gets from society. It must be clear 
to any ordinary mortal, that the value 
of that service is not what a man does 
for himself. If a farmer builds a barn, 
is that a service rendered by society? 
If not, what moral right has the town 
to send an increased tax bill, having 
rendered no service, nor increased its 
expenditure on behalf of that farmer? 
The building of the barn was a service 
rendered to the farmer by himself. 
He gets nothing more from the county 
after he has built the barn than he did 
before he built it, and any tax collected 
thereon is simply plain stealing by due 
process of law. 

This characterization applies to all 
taxes levied upon all labor values. 
Now if we were to assess a tax of 5 
per cent. on the land values of this 
state, we would have so much money 
we would be delirious with joy, and 
it would cut down immensely the 
amounts now unjustly collected from 
the farmers and the rural districts 
generally. 

IS NOT THIS TRUE? 

An ordinary farm of one hundred 
acres worth $10,000, with modern im- 

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provements, would have not more than 
$500 land value. If money was worth 
5 per cent. in the open market, sup- 
posing the single tax was applied in its 
fullness, that farmer would pay $25 
per year in full payment for all services 
rendered him by society. This may 
seem like a small amount, and it 
should by right be a small amount, for 
the services society renders the farmer 
are very few. Water? The wheezy 
pump in his own dug well. Sewer? 
Slops thrown out of the back door. 
Light? John D’s energy bought by the 
gallon at a good price. Roads? Mainly 
made by the farmers themselves, and 
they look it. Schools? Of a meager 
quality. As to location and convenience 
—several miles from any good town. 
If he wants a plow point or a pound of 
tea, it means a drive to the store with 
loss of time for man and team. If he 
goes to church to thank God for the 
great advantages of farm life, it is 
probably a long drive. If he wants to 
attend a theater, the average farmer in 
this state would have to go a hundred 
miles, and to visit a first-class store 
about the same distance. 


The only true measure of the value 
of social presence and social service, 
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is the value of the land, exclusive of 
improvements, that a man _ possesses. 
All social service, such as water, sewers, 
light, police and fire protection, side- 
walks and street paving, cleaning, etc., 
are reflected in the value of the land, 
but not in the value of the buildings 
or in any of the improvements on or 
in the land. 


A man having a home in New York 
City, on a lot 25x 100 feet, the land 
worth about $20,000, gets infinitely 
more from society in the way of social 
advantage than a farmer way up in the 
state, whose farm consists of labor 
values amounting to $9,500, and land 
values of $500. The city man is within 
thirty minutes of the New York Cen- 
tral or Pennsylvania railroad stations, 
where he can get a train to whirl him 
away to any part of this continent. He 
is within thirty minutes of Grand Opera, 
or the best theaters in the world, or 
in the same lapse of time he can be 
aboard the ocean steamships that will 
convey him to any part of the world. 
He is also close to natural history and 
art museums, libraries, schools, colleges 
and universities. The best stores in the 
world are within a few blocks of his 
house. In fact, he can have no desire 

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that cannot be more easily satisfied in 
that city than anywhere else on this 
continent. In a word, he receives from 
society the maximum advantage from 
social presence and social utilities, and 
the sum total of all these things is reg- 
istered in the enormous land values of 
the great city. 


To understand how great the amount 
of the land values of New York, I have 
but to draw attention to the fact that 
the ordinary lot values of the city are 
assessed at about $5,000,000,000 and 
the assessed value of all improvements 
thereon is only $3,000,000,000. 


The farmers of this state complain 
—and not without great and just 
reason—that they are over-taxed. Their 
attempts to throw off this unjust burden 
has been like the blind mole in the 
swamp—the more he struggled the 
deeper he sank in the mire. The rea- 
son may be laid to the farmer’s lack 
of economic knowledge, for he did not 
know that to tax labor valyes is to in- 
crease the cost of living and to restrict 
production. When we tax stocks of 
goods we but increase the price of the 
goods to the people who use them. 
When we tax mortgages, we either 
raise the rate of interest, or make it 

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harder to raise money on mortgage. 
When we tax money in bank, it is with 
the same result. 


You cannot tax the wealthy person 
if that is your purpose, by taxing 
wealth. Again we should not tax men, 
or attempt to do so, simply because 
they are wealthy. We should tax or 
charge men for the full value of what 
they get from society. A man should 
pay for what he gets, not for what he 
has. It makes no difference whether 
he is dealing with a storekeeper or 
with society. 


The disastrous result of our wicked 
tax system cannot be overestimated. 
We raise the cost of living by taxing 
labor products, and we also raise the 
cost of living by failing to tax land 
values fully. The reason is this: we 
offer a greater reward and increasingly 
greater as time goes on, to the land 
speculator, paying him to withhold 
large areas of valuable land from the 
use of labor and capital, making land 
artificially scarce and very dear in our 
great centers of population, thereby 
raising rents and shutting the door of 
opportunity on labor and capital, as 
well as destroying the farmer’s market. 
The high rents of our cities has a 

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ruinous effect upon the city dweller’s 
ability to buy farm products. 


The income of the average worker 
in the cities is $600 a year. His rent 
averages $250 a year. After he meets 
the demands of the landlord, and that 
is the first call, he has little left to buy 
labor products of mill, factory or farm. 

We will succeed in putting the tax 
burden where it belongs and where it 
can most easily be borne only when we 
take social value for social use. 


Our present stupid and criminal tax 
method punishes the good and rewards 
the evil. It fines those who use their 
opportunities and gives a premium to 
those who do not. We have made it 
more profitable to be an idler and a 
grafter than to be a worker. 


LEGALIZED ROBBERY 


A man named Wendell recently died 
in New York. He was noted for one 
thing—he never did anything useful. 
He was a large owner of land, but he 
never spent a dollar for a pound of 
nails, a foot of lumber, brick or mortar 
—never rendered any service or pro- 
duced a dollar’s worth of wealth. Yet 
he died worth $50,000,000. After such 
a life of idleness, you ask, “How © 

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such remarkable results? Whence came 
the Aladdin’s lamp? What was the 
mystic power that secured for an idler 
$80,000,000?” It was our thieving tax 
system that gave public made property 
or value to this man. Then to add 
to the sum of its folly, the city, after 
giving away its true and honest revenue, 
must commit grand larceny by taking 
large sums of private property to re- 
place the revenue which it should 
rightfully have claimed and taken. 


Our present tax system is a fraud 
and a humbug. Our tax rolls are but 
a collection of guesses flavored by 
favoritism and fraud. Our whole method 
of raising public revenue is but grand 
and petit larceny from beginning to 
end. We rob the producing citizen of 
his private property for public use, and 
rob society of its public property by 
giving land value to private citizens. 


If a man paints, repairs or improves 
a house, we fine him. If he plants a 
tree, builds a barn, erects a fence, 
clears up his farm and makes it by 
labor more productive, we punish him. 
We have made it more profitable to 
hold land idle than to use it. For that 
reason in all our cities there is twice as 
much idle land as there is used land. 


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On many of our principal streets a 
small percentage of our buildings are 
modern. 


Where should we raise public revenue? 
Is it not clear that we should raise 
it from the area benefited by social 
utilities and not from private produc- 
tion? If we follow this principle it 
would relieve the farmers of a great 
burden they now carry, and make the 
men pay who are in reality best able 
to pay, because they get the most 
from society. 


Who opposes the single tax aside 
from those who are ignorant of its 
principles and know not what they do? 
The opponents of the single tax con- 
sist of the easy-money fraternity, 
polite grafters, but grafters neverthe- 
less—the men who want something for 
nothing; who hunger to gather where 
others have sown; men who wish to 
enjoy the fruits of labor without the 
annoyance of laboring. 


The single tax would relieve labor 
and capital from an enormous and un- 
just burden. It will lower the cost of 
living, it will increase the earnings of 
labor and real capital. It will force 
into use land now held out of use for 

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speculation, and thereby increase the 
opportunities for labor and capital. It 
will lower rents in our great cities and 
thereby improve the market for 
farmers’ products. It will produce a 
normal and natural parity between the 
value of the opportunity to produce, 
and the value of the things produced. 


It will but take for social use, social 
value. It will not take anything that 
any man produces and to which he has’ 
a moral title. It will not offer any re- 
ward to idleness as our present system 
does; but it will secure to labor and 
capital their full production. What is 
the fruit of this evil tree that we in our 
ignorance have planted and nourished 
all these years? Idle men and idle 
capital, low wages and low interest, 
the streets filled with beggars, the 
highways with tramps, the homes of 
the workers with poverty, the lives of 
business men with carking care. It 
has made our social life a horrid thing 
—want, suffering and crime on every 
hand. 


Luxurious idleness produces en- 
forced idleness. The stream of human 
misery flows on like the river in the 
midst of the sea; a resistless, never- 
ceasing tide, destroying everything 

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lovable in millions of lives—more dan- 
gerous than “the arrow that flieth by 
day,| and, the pestilence that walketh 
by night.’’.. ‘There are no social ills 
that cannot be traced to our wicked 
and unjust tax system. 


Social value for social use; private 
property for private use—are the only 
sound principles upon which to base 
a system of public revenue. 


NINN 


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